By Derrick Crowe
October 27, 2022
Dust fell onto the screen of Dela’s reader as a tremor shook her basement laboratory. She cursed, wiped the grit away, and scanned the information displayed on the device. Almost ready.
Sounds of a speech drifted unintelligibly through the band of short windows along the top of the circular chamber. Across the street in the performance hall, hundreds of her compatriots had gathered for the final debate about whether to begin the revolution tonight, and she was running behind. Others would make arguments and best guesses on their prospects for success, but Dela had no intention of making an assertion. She intended to know.
Above the three-meter-wide depression in the center of the lab, the result of a decade of careful experimentation, observation, and logistics hung from a tangled trunk of cabling as wide as a person. A meter-wide globe of glowing glass dangled there, like a charm, pulsing soft white light from its perch at waist height from the stone floor. Dela used to have a complicated, scientifically accurate name for it, but lately, owing to how she expected it to work, she called it the Lure.
Raucous cheers erupted across the street. Someone had hit the right note with the crowd.
Her poor pet cat, with its blind right eye and odd tail, bumped against her, oblivious. She stooped down to pat it and winced at the pain in her back and hip. “Fewer demagogues,” she said to the little animal. “More evidence, eh?” The little gray creature arched up into her touch and purred.
A short rumble shook her lab again. Dust drifted down through the Lure’s radiance, with the occasional mote of silica catching the light and twinkling like stars. Oh, the comet, she thought to herself. As the machine cycled up, she indulged herself one quick trip to the window to peek out at the faint smear in the light-polluted city sky. Geoff, her favorite colleague at the university, had been obsessed with it, warning that in a dozen centuries its orbit posed a serious threat. Looking at it calmed her nerves, regardless.
Poor Geoff, she thought. At least he completed his part of the project before–
Boom. Another rumble. Louder. This time the vibrations triggered the collapse of a poorly stacked pile of papers from a table across the room. The half-blind cat hopped onto the spot where they had stood and looked at her with wide eyes.
“You’re right,” she said, and swallowed hard. “No more time to mess around.”
She walked back to the reader she’d left on the nearest workbench, picked it up, saw that the machine was ready, and pressed the flat screen to her chest. For a moment the gravity of the situation bore down on her. If her comrades across the street were wrong, if they weren’t strong enough for the task they were trying to convince themselves to undertake tonight, the results could be catastrophic. And even if they won, their enemies’ weapons were such that even in defeat, they could destroy the future. But if she and her friends failed to act, their opponents might grow so strong that no resistance could be possible again in their lifetimes.
Speakers from all perspectives were addressing the crowd tonight in the last debate. There would be no more discussion a few hours from now. Someone would persuade the gathered crowd to either revolt or scatter to the wind. There would be action, one way or another.
“We need more information,” she said to herself. The cat stared at her.
Taking a deep breath, she held the reader out and looked at the screen. For a moment she caught her own reflection. Her sun-bleached hair and heavily lined face peered back at her. She looked into the eyes of her reflection, steadying herself, then pressed a red symbol on the touch screen.
ACTIVATE.
A loud, electric buzz erupted so suddenly that she jumped and dropped the pad to the floor. The light from the Lure blazed for a moment and dimmed. For a moment, she felt a squeeze in her ears like an altitude change, and the Lure seemed to sink into space. The air around it warped like a heat distortion, and she worried for a moment that she had made a mistake and was about to cook in her own lab, but she relaxed after a second or two when no flash of warmth touched her face. The buzz settled into a low hum, and then it dropped to subaudible levels that she could only feel.
For a moment, everything was still. And then she felt it. She was not alone in the room. Her feline companion let out a low groan and arched its back. Someone was here besides the cat.
The heavy wooden door to the lab opened, though Dela could see no one in the opening. It closed again. A blur of the faintest light appeared in front of the doorframe. Slowly, it approached the brilliant crystal globe. Not approached. Walked. With every step, a human form came further into focus, until, after the dozenth step, Dela found herself face-to-face with an apparition of a human woman, rendered in ghostlight. The two looked at each other, astounded.
Dela’s visitor was dressed in simple clothing–primitive was a better word–a mix of animal skins and simple weaving. Rough-crafted boots, one of them worn completely through at the toes, shod her feet. She carried a heavy pack. Her beautiful, strong-jawed face was marred by something Dela took to be a scar that ran from her chin to her left ear. Fear contorted the visitor’s wide-eyed face, and she dropped her pack, which faded from view. A stream of unintelligible words erupted from her.
Dela held up her hands, “It’s okay. You’re safe. I couldn’t harm you if I wanted to.”
The woman flinched, stepping back, blurring slightly as she withdrew from the Lure.
“No!” Dela half-yelled, close to panic, stepping forward. “Don’t go!” She held her palms parallel to the ground and made a settling motion. “Stay,” she ventured, trying to calm her own voice.
“Nai! Nai!” the woman yelled, grimacing and holding up her hands, stepping backwards more and blurring further.
“No!” Dela cried out, stepping forward again, reaching for the apparition. “Don’t go! I have so much to ask you!”
But it was too late. The woman shrieked, turned, and ran, blurring into invisibility. The doors opened and shut.
Dela hobbled as fast as her aging frame could carry her to the door and flung it open. Down the long corridor, she saw no one. For a moment, the light of the Lure behind her flung her own dark shadow down the empty hallway, but then she heard a spark and the light level dropped as the Lure disengaged.
Tears welled up in Dela’s eyes. She closed the door again and slapped it hard enough to make her hand sting. When she turned, the cat had bounded up on the nearest table and was looking her straight in the eyes. Behind her, a thin trail of smoke drifted from the trunk of cables above the globe.
She wiped her eyes, pulled out a cloth to wipe her nose, trying to calm herself. After a moment, the initial shock of the experience passed, and a strong, calm thought occurred to her.
“It worked,” she whispered. She scooped up the reader from where it lay on the ground, thankfully undamaged. She examined the data it displayed. “It worked,” she said, louder.
Limping to the back wall of the lab, she retrieved a stepladder and unfolded it near the device in the center of the room. Stepping up, she examined the source of the smoke. When she turned back to her cat, she was smiling.
“Nothing serious,” she said. “I can fix it in less than thirty seconds, and we have plenty of power left.” The cat, moving from terror to boredom at feline speed, flopped to the floor and began to clean a paw. “Mew,” it offered.
Dela moved to a cluttered workbench and, after a few moments, she found what she needed. She scooped up a cutting tool and one of her two spares for the failed component.
Boom. The Lure wobbled from the tremor.
“Okay,” she said, heading back up the stepladder. “Let’s try again.”